Service with the green frog
.JPG)
The service with the green frog (also known as the frog service ) is a comprehensive dinner service that was made by the English ceramic manufacturer Wedgwood for the Russian Empress Catherine the Great . The service, completed in 1774, had place settings for 50 people and consisted of a total of 944 parts, 680 parts being dishes for the main course and 264 parts being dishes for dessert. At the request of Catherine II, the dishes were decorated with hand-painted British views that were copied from prints; a total of 1,222 different motifs are shown on the dishes. Regarding the Tschesmensk palace , for which the dishes were intended, each part of the dishes was decorated with a green frog in a coat of arms.
The tableware was made from Wedgwood's “ Queen's ware ”, a cream-colored ceramic with a thin layer of glaze developed in the factory. This is unusual for an extensive dinner service intended for a royal court, where porcelain was mostly preferred.
The majority of the dinner service is now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg .
Background of the creation
In 1770 the Russian Navy achieved a decisive victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) in the sea battle of Çeşme . The commander of the Russian troops was Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov , a brother of Katherina's lover, Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov ; both brothers were in the coup d'etat of Catherine II against her husband Peter III. were involved and had thus made a significant contribution to their accession to the throne.
Katharina decided to honor the victory by building the Chesmensk Church and the Chesmensk Palace , the names of which were to commemorate the battle. The palace was planned as an imperial travel palace on the route between St. Petersburg and Katharina's summer palace in Tsarskoye Selo (now Moskovsky Prospect). The image of the frog on the dinner service, which was intended for use in the Tschesmensk Palace, alludes to the name of the district in which it was built. The area was called "Frog Swamp" ( Kekerekeksinsky ), at the French-speaking Russian imperial court it was called "La Grenouillère " .
Manufacture and decoration
Katherina II ordered the service with the green frog in 1773 through Alexander Baxter, the Russian consul in London. English vedutas and the identification with the green frog were expressly requested. The Empress was very interested in Britain, although she had never visited it. The fact that British naval officers such as John Elphinstone and Samuel Greigh played an important role in the naval battle of Çeşme may have been the reason for the desired decoration with British views. According to Llewellynn Jewitt, the Victorian biographer Josiah Wedgwoods , the latter initially refused to deface the service by " depicting a reptile ", whereupon he was told, however, that there was no room for negotiation on this point.
Wedgwood's business partner Thomas Bentley made a selection of views, mainly from the books in the Buck's Antiquities series by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck , published between 1726 and 1752, and from the Antiquities of England and Wales by Francis Grose, the first volume of which was published in 1772. Engravings based on paintings by Thomas Smith of Derby with views of the Peak District and the Lake District also served as models. Furthermore, views of Stowe House and the London area by John Baptist Chatelain and Anthony Devis were used as templates. For some motifs, Wedgwood also commissioned paintings or drawings or loaned them from the owners of the respective country houses.
Individual parts of the service were decorated with views of British industrial buildings. Others show views of gardens and parks in the new style of the English landscape garden , in which Catherine II was very interested. For example, views of 17 gardens by the English landscape architect Capability Brown were shown in the service. Many of the residences shown were owned by good Wedgwood customers, for whom the idea that views of their country houses and parks reached the Russian imperial court would undoubtedly have been very flattering. Josiah Wedgwood's own residence, Etruria Hall, was also depicted on one of the serving platters.
.JPG)
The edges of the dishes were decorated with a strip with frieze-like ornaments ( kymation ). In addition, the edges of the buildings were decorated with a tendril-like decoration with oak leaves and acorns. On the other hand, on the crockery parts belonging to the dessert equipment, the tendrils were depicted with heart-shaped ivy leaves. The entire decor was in a monochrome sepia tone , only the eponymous frog was shown in green.
The service was made in "Queen's ware", a fine earthenware developed by Wedgwood. The ceramic was cream-colored and was given a thin layer of glaze. The dishes were initially molded and glazed in Wedgwood's workshop in Stoke-on-Trent , where they were first fired. They were then transported to London, where they were painted in the company's workshop on Little Cheyne Row, Chelsea, opened in 1769 . Finally, they were subjected to a second firing in order to fix the painting applied to the glaze. More than 30 ceramic painters were busy decorating the dishes.
Before the tableware was shipped to Russia, it was displayed to the general public in Wedgwood's showrooms at Portland House, Soho, in June 1774 . The exhibition is said to have comprised 5 rooms in which tables that were set with the dishes were set up. The individual parts of the dishes were numbered on the underside, based on which a catalog for Catherine II was compiled, which Wedgwood also published.
The price for the tableware was £ 2,290, which in view of the large number of tableware items and the lavish decoration must be seen as a very low price. The cost to manufacture was £ 2,612. Ultimately, Wedgwood received a payment of just over £ 2,700 for the dishes, leaving them with very little profit. However, the delivery of the service to the Russian imperial court was associated with an enormous gain in reputation for the company.
Wedgwood withheld various pieces of made-out dishes upon delivery. On the one hand, there were test pieces, crockery parts of the dessert dishes that had inadvertently been decorated with the decor of the tableware, and probably also some pieces with views that in retrospect had not been rated as interesting enough.
After delivery
_service_for_Catherine_II_of_Russia_-_Wedgwood,_1774,_creamware_-_Brooklyn_Museum_-_DSC08997.JPG)
The Tschesmensker Palais was completed in 1780, shortly after the service was delivered, and it seems that it was rarely used by Catherine II. Wedgwood biographer Jewitt reports, however, that Catherine II presented the dinner service to the British ambassador James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury, in the palace in 1795.
Although the service meant a great gain in reputation for the Wedgwood company and contributed to its great fame, it also represents an end point for the development of English fine ceramics, especially for the high quality standard of the fine hand-painted earthenware. Wedgwood endeavored to achieve the great and the experienced team of ceramic painters that he had put together for the commission, but finally found that he could not achieve the high prices even with the finest hand-painted ceramic ware that would have been necessary to cover the costs of the elaborate decorative painting. Most of his customers were unwilling to pay the same high prices for earthenware as for china. Around 1774 the company produced a number of tableware items that were decorated with variations of the decorative elements of the service with the green frog, but none of these parts depicted the green frog; on some pieces the views were also shown in color.
In the Museum of the Hermitage there are now several hundred parts of the frog service. The Wedgwood Museum has at least 5 items from the tableware, and there are also individual items from the service in other museums. In 2009, a platter from the service auctioned for $ 46,000; a dessert plate each sold for £ 14,000 in 2001 and £ 17,000 in 2004. In 1995 Wedgwood began reproducing the tableware in a limited edition. In the same year a monograph and a complete catalog for the frog harness were published in London.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mikhail B. Piotrovsky (2000). Treasures of Catherine the Great. Harry N. Abrams. P. 184.
- ↑ a b c d e f g Desert Plate in the British Museum Collection online , accessed on March 22, 2019.
- ^ Judith Flanders: Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. , Harper Collins UK, 2006, ISBN 0-00-717295-8 , p. 64.
- ↑ a b c d Elizabeth McKellar: Plate from the 'Frog Service' , 2018, ERA (European Romanticisms in Association).
- ^ A b c d Marina Vaizey: Science into Art, Art into Science. in: The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, No 2, 2016 (51).
- ^ A b c d e Matthew Sweet: Wedgwood: The Empress and the Frog. on "The Fund", September 23, 2014, accessed March 22, 2019.
- ↑ a b c d Llewellynn Jewitt: The Wedgwoods: Being a Life of Josiah Wedgwood; with Notices of His Works and Their Productions, Memoirs of the Wedgwood and Other Families, and a History of the Early Potteries of Staffordshire. , Pp. 211-212, Virtue Brothers and Company, 1865.
- ↑ a b c d e Wedgwood, frogs and a hedgehog ... on the homepage of the Gardem Trust, accessed on March 22, 2019.
- ↑ Jeremy Black: Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1783 , p. 69, Macmillan International Higher Education, 2008, ISBN 978-1-137-16346-2 .
- ↑ Jane Brown: The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot 'capability' Brown, 1716–1783 , pp. 311, 2011, Random House, ISBN 978-0-7011-8212-0 .
- ^ Frog service remnant jumps to $ 46,000 , Antiques Trade Gazette , August 17, 2009, accessed March 22, 2019.
- ^ M. Raeburn, L. N Veronikhina, A. Nurnberg (eds.) Eds .: The Green Frog Service: Wedgwood & Bentley's Imperial Russian Service , Cacklegoose Press, London, 1995.